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Models for System in Idealist Encyclopedics: The Circle, The Line, and the Body

The Eighteenth Century has been called the “age of the encyclopedia,” but
the understanding of that word is very different in the encyclopedias of Chambers and
Diderot on the one hand, and on the other hand the German Idealist tradition variously
exemplified by Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, Schelling’s On University Studies, and Novalis’
Romantic Encyclopedia. In Kant’s terms, the first provides an
aggregate of knowledge, whereas the second attempts a system that entails an
architectonic. Focusing on Hegel’s desire to unify all the sciences through the
meta-discipline of philosophy, this paper explores the increasing complication of his
architectonic by the very figures he uses to safeguard it: namely the circle, the line,
and the body. Tracing the supplementary relationship between the first and the second, I
argue that the body with its multiple subsystems brings to a head the collapse of the
“smooth” system Hegel intended into a “tangled’” system: a productive collapse, because
instead of being a forced unification of knowledge, the encyclopedia becomes a
thought-environment for transferences between disciplines and potentially the emergence of
new disciplines. Or, in effect, it becomes a form of “Theory” avant la lettre.

Models for System in Idealist Encyclopedics: The Circle, The Line, and the Body

Tilottama RajanThe University of Western
Ontario; Canada Research Chair and Distinguished University Professor

Encylopedias and Encyclopedics

1. In encyclopedias that proliferated in the eighteenth century, the body, map and tree
are frequent schemas for system. These figures project what Deleuze and Guattari call a
striated space with clear coordinates (361-2) that can be compared to Kant’s equation of
system with “architectonic,” which Kant naturalizes through the body that assigns parts
their functions and subordinates them to a whole (Reason 691).
Yet what if the body is not an anatomical body, but is composed of multiple systems that
work on different levels and in different registers: circulatory, digestive, nervous
etc.? This paper reflects on the different conceptualizations of system generated by
different analogues for organization, and the different models of intellectual formation
produced by such systems. For my purposes encyclopedias that gather up all the pieces of
information spawned by an expanding print culture can be distinguished from the
“encyclopedics” developed by German Idealist and Romantic philosophers, such as Hegel,
Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. The material entities we call encyclopedias
are multiply authored resources for information retrieval that were increasingly
arranged in alphabetic form and intended for multiple readers. But the more metaphorical
encyclopedias such as Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences (1817-32) or Novalis’ Notes for a Romantic
Encyclopedia (1798) are singly authored projects that go back to the root
meaning of the term enkyklos paedeia, meaning a circle of learning
that aims, not just at information, but at knowledge to be taken in by a single reader.
But “metaphorical” is a misnomer, since it was only with Chambers and Diderot that the
term encyclopedia even came to mean a work of reference rather than a general system of
education (McArthur 103). Implicit in what I am calling encyclopedics, then, to
distinguish it from this modern use of the word encyclopedia, is a program of learning
or Bildung that occurs through a “cycle” of the sciences, or, as I
shall argue, the problematizing of such a program.

2. This difference occurs across what Derrida calls “philosophical continents”: French
and British vs. German (“Sendoffs” 243). Though there is a spectral dialogue between
them, Hegel marks this division when he distinguishes his “philosophical encyclopedia”
from “ordinary encyclopedias,” which are an “assemblage of sciences” that are often only
“bits of information” (Encyclopedia 53). To elaborate, by the
eighteenth century encyclopedias were mostly alphabetic, crossing lines with
dictionaries. Yet from Chambers’ Cyclopedia onwards (1728),
they evinced anxieties about the empiricism of the alphabet. Thus Chambers expresses
almost the same concerns as Hegel, when he speaks of the need to dispose “a Variety of
Materials” so as “not to make a confused Heap of incongruous Parts, but one consistent
Whole.” This, he says, he attains “by considering the several Matters” both “as so many
Wholes, and as so many Parts of some greater Whole” linked by a “Reference.” But in a
version of what would be later known as the hermeneutic circle, where the parts can only
be known through the whole and vice versa, he also discusses the advantages of a
dictionary within a system, namely that the former keeps one apprised of the “Pins and
Joints,” the thousand things we might ignore, which is the only way “the Whole Circle or
Body of Knowledge can be deliver’d” (i-ii).

3. These material encyclopedias, in other words, tried to be both empirical and
systematic. Indeed “system” is the battle-cry of the Encyclopedia
Britannica (EB). To be sure, the EB seems to converge with Hegel’s emphasis on disciplines, on gathering up
all the “philosophical sciences,” since its title page claims that it is conceived on “a
Plan entirely New” in which the “Sciences and Arts are digested into Distinct Treatises
or Systems,” with the aim of uniting all the “detached parts” into a “system.” But the
very word system has undergone a sea-change. The major entries are not always on
disciplines and are also often on what we might call “practices.” These entries are
therefore systems in the sense Clifford Siskin uses the word when he describes 1798 as
“the year of the system” (12). Though internally architectonic in Kant’s terms, they
exhibit a micro-specialisation in which each discipline or practice has its own system,
the placing of disciplines and practices on the same surface itself being an example of
this micro-specialization.

4. Material encyclopedias, in other words, are systematic in the sense of containing
multiple modular systems rather than a total system of knowledge: a model that comes
back to haunt Hegel and Schelling. Their logics of unification—such as an opening
diagram of a tree with many branches, or in the case of Chambers, prefatory references
to a land to be divided up into provinces, a body of knowledge, branches of knowledge,
and the circle of knowledge (i, vii)– are strictly supplementary. For one thing, minor
entries are cross-referenced only to the system to which they belong, and there is not
that much cross-referencing among systems, or if there is, it is strictly indexical and
not conceptual. And many minor entries also remain undigested into any larger system, so
that in the end the signifier of totality is simply the material container of the book.
Indeed, while there is a residual discourse of unity in Chambers, we could argue that by
the time of the EB, systematicity has come to mean method
rather than totality. Parts of knowledge are “digested” into systems or treatises: a
dead metaphor that we will see operating more luridly in Hegel. But these “digests” are
themselves parts. They are just more comprehensively gathered up than in the growing
number of periodicals that also provided summaries of books, including foreign books, so
as to establish a transnational public sphere of communication. [1]

5. In fact, more than Chambers and his early modern precursors such as Vincent of
Beauvais, who still pay lip-service to the circle or course of knowledge, the EB stands on the cusp of a transition from encyclopedic knowledge to
information, already confessing that there “is some inconvenience in ... perusing a
whole system when we only want to consult a particular topic” (2 ed. iv). Or as Tom MacArthur puts it, certain kinds of data –
existing in catalogues, directories, dictionaries etc.—are better off outside the brain:
just as we do with things, so too we can put “mental objects in the equivalent of bags"
and carry them around. (7). While information is nothing new, what we do see in material
encyclopedias is a shift in sensibility wherein by our own time, the modular,
informational model will extend to the whole of knowledge, the very re-purposing of the
word encyclopedia being a symptom of this shift.

Smooth vs. Tangled Systems: the Principles of System in Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and
Novalis

6. It is in this environment that Hegel undertakes his “philosophical” as opposed to
“ordinary” encyclopedia, [2] and that Friedrich Schlegel says that the
“encyclopedia of the French is totally a wrong tendency –whereas this project is native
to Germany” (qd. Behler 284). Not that there were no ordinary encyclopedias in Germany,
but the argument here is for an Idealist and/or Romantic rather than empiricist or
technological encyclopedia like Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Thus Hegel’s aim, and less systematically Schelling’s in his
lectures on University Studies, is both to preserve the
coherence of a circle or cycle of disciplines and to expand the provenance of philosophy
beyond Kant’s politically cautious limitation of it to a lower faculty (Conflict 43-58). It is to bring “Idealism ... into all the sciences,” as
Schelling puts it (World-Soul 94). With that in mind, while
expanding the reach of philosophy to the life sciences, aesthetics etc., Hegel also
strictly limits himself to “philosophical sciences,” participating in a tradition that
goes back to Christian Wolff’s division of philosophical from historical or empirical
knowledge, and forward to Husserl’s narrower distinction between “eidetic” and “factual”
sciences ( Husserl, Ideas 62-4). Hegel does include sciences
such as aesthetics “that exist for themselves outside of philosophy in general,” but
have a “rational basis” which also allows them to be treated philosophically (Encyclopedia 53). But he excludes “pseudosciences” such as heraldry
that are “thoroughly positive” (53): a dig at British encyclopedias that include this
topic, in one case as a way of securing commercial patronage.

7. Most of all Hegel is concerned to protect “philosophy” from the “English” confusion of
it with “experimental physics” (or natural philosophy), so that “electrical machines ...
pumps and the like are called philosophical instruments” (Encyclopedia 49)– a use of “philosophy” that we do indeed find in British
scientific journals at the time. Reading all knowledge that matters through philosophy,
Hegel’s system therefore strives to be a totality. This is to say that Hegel does not
conceive his Encyclopedia as a multi-use resource but as an integrated system of
knowledge, in which ‘system’ is tied up with the seriousness of knowledge and the
education (“Bildung” [3]) of self-consciousness as spirit, what Derrida
calls an auto- and onto-encyclopedia of spirit (“Age of Hegel” 148). Hence the constant
emphasis on system, in Hegel’s insistence that knowledge can only be “expounded as ...
system” (Phenomenology 13-14), and in Schelling’s constant
search for a system and his unworking of his various systems. Hence also Hegel’s
narrativizing of system as something more than merely structural, when he divides his
Encyclopedia into three parts that take the form of a journey
or phenomenology of consciousness: “1) logic, the science of the idea in and for itself;
2) the philosophy of nature, as the science of the idea in its otherness; 3) the
philosophy of spirit, the science of the idea as it returns to itself from its
otherness” (54). But needless to say this travel outwards to the margins of philosophy,
in Hegel’s increasingly complex and multicomponent system, will result in multiple
infractions from these margins that threaten philosophy’s systematic self-concept.

8. Underpinning Hegel’s conception of system according to a pars pro toto logic
(Encylopedia 51) is Kant’s notion of architectonic,
introduced as early as the lectures on Physical Geography,
where it is connected to the idea of the encyclopedia. Here Kant writes that we “need to
become acquainted with the objects of our experience as a whole,”
so that our knowledge will form “not an aggregation but a system; for in a system the whole is prior to
the parts, while in an aggregation the parts have priority” (446).
In the first Critique Kant further develops this concept of
“architectonic,” repeating his distinction between system/science and aggregates. System
is not just method, but the “unity of the manifold cognitions under one idea,” within a
whole in which “the position of the parts with respect to each other is determined
a priori.” Kant’s image for this whole from which parts cannot be
“contingent[ly]” added or subtracted is the body, a figure to which we will return
(691). But suffice it to say that Kant’s notion of the body is essentially aesthetic,
where aesthetics, in Baumgarten’s terms, is “ars pulchre cogitandi,” the art of thinking
beautifully (#533). This is to say that Kant’s notion of system differs from Hegel’s in
being purely spatial, diagrammatic. As such it is a “schema” (Reason 691), and in the schematic mode, as Schelling says, the universal has
not been unified with the particular; the schema is only a “rule” governing production
(Philosophy of Art 46-7). Kant’s spatial, synchronic
conception of the body, and the fact that he operates within Baumgarten’s idea of
“aesthetics as “the analogy of reason” and a supplement to logic, results in a smooth
system, securely –even if only from a transcendental perspective– under the governance
of philosophy. [4]

9. The terms smooth and tangled are Bruno Latour’s version of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s
closed vs. open systems, which I extend here to the architecture of knowledge. Objects
that we understand smoothly have defined boundaries: we grasp them
separately, and changes in them are accidents that do not affect their substance.
Tangled objects are affected by neighbouring objects and unwork, destabilize and rework
knowledge (Latour 20-3). While Kant’s work was not restricted to philosophy – he also
lectured on anthropology and geography – he always begins by mapping the space of
knowledge and delimiting the place of a field within it. Within a larger architectonic
that Kant (unlike his successors) did not presume to construct, “the position of the
parts” or individual disciplines “with respect to each other” is “determined a
priori” by philosophy (Reason 691). More
specifically, “every science [has] its determinate position in the encyclopedia of the
sciences” and if “it is a philosophical science, then we must assign it its position in
either its theoretical or its practical part” (Judgment 285).
As Kant zooms in to a particular zone of the map, the smoothness of this distinction is
maintained, and the margins of philosophy are given their a priori
location. So for instance, in the lectures on Physical
Geography, Kant first evokes the larger map, and divides knowledge into the
rational and empirical. And he then divides the latter into knowledge of the internal or
the soul and knowledge of the external, the second being subdivided into knowledge of
man or the world and knowledge of nature. The former is anthropology and is pragmatic
rather than speculative, and the latter is physical geography (445-6).

10. Following this rational/empirical division, Kant is also careful to delimit philosophy
and not to hybridize it, even though the reality of his circumstances was that he had to
teach outside philosophy, which had not yet institutionally become a
Fachwissenschaft (or special subject). Thus even in the
pre-Critical phase, his lectures on the Encyclopedia which he gave ten times between
1767 and 1782, really deal only with the encyclopedia of philosophy, and unlike Hegel’s
History of Philosophy, which entangles philosophy with its
history, they do so from a purely transcendental perspective. [5] Kant begins by distinguishing historical
sciences, which are forms of learnedness, from rational sciences which are sciences of
insight, and he then subdivides the latter into philosophy as a discursive science and
mathematics as a science of construction. As an encyclopedia in the sense of a digest or
“kurzer Auszug” of philosophy (Vorlesung 31-2), the lectures
then sketch the principles of what would become Kant’s critical philosophy. In other
words Kant’s sense of system, whether it is the total system of knowledge or the system
of an individual part, is of a structure laid out in a “striated” or divisible space,
and then partitioned according to an a priori logic. He therefore
conceives the totality of knowledge as a smooth rather than tangled system, in which the
parts may be thought through analogy but are always kept firmly separate and do not
bleed into one another. For Kant there are no mixtures or “intersciences,” as Derrida
calls them, and no new forms of thought that emerge in the interstices between existing
fields. As he says quite definitely, “no science can belong to the transition” from one
domain to the other “since that signifies only the articulation or organization of the
system and not a place within it” (Judgment 285).

11. In his early lectures on University Studies, Schelling also
uses the figure of the body to think the system of knowledge synchronically, but with a
crucial difference. Drawing on a Spinozist vocabulary of emanations from or modes of a
single substance, Schelling describes how all knowledge, “flow[s] from a single centre”:
“Those sciences which reflect primordial knowledge most directly ... are ... the
sensorium of the organic body of knowledge. We must start from the central organs and
trace the life that flows from them through various channels to the outermost parts”
(42). But as mystical as this articulation of the body is, and as close as it remains to
what Deleuze calls the “organism” as distinct from the decentralized “body without
organs” (44-8), Schelling does not conceive the body architectonically as a striated
space, but rather in terms of flows. We will return to this metaphor of “fluidity” in
both Schelling and Hegel. Suffice it to say that Schelling conceives the space of
knowledge as “smooth” in Deleuze and Guattari’s very particular sense of that term,
which is virtually the opposite of Latour’s. Both usages valorize open over closed
systems. But while Latour defines smooth objects as bounded and divided off, Deleuze and
Guattari oppose an open space that they call “smooth” to a more conventional “striated”
space, which is divisible, segmented and thus bounded (Thousand
Plateaus 361-2). Schelling, we could say, wants to have both kinds of
smoothness. He wants a system that is open and not inorganically divided up. And yet he
also wants one that is smooth in the sense of being a totality, which is impossible, as
is evident when he writes about the world of nature, whose tangled systems
transferentially affect the way system itself is conceived.

12. For purposes of this paper, I will not take up Schelling except as a dialogical gloss
on Hegel. [6]
For even during the period that saw the publication of his most idealistic work,
including On University Studies (1803) and The Philosophy of
Art (1803/4), Schelling already recognized system as perspectival, constructing several
systems: a System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), but on the
other hand numerous systems of nature. Indeed the experimentalism of these systems can
be seen in the fact that Schelling uses, almost interchangeably, the words “system,”
“first outline [Entwurf]” “ideas for” and “introduction” to a
philosophy of nature, which he may or may not be able to bring into identity with
transcendental philosophy so as to create a system of the whole. This Naturphilosophie, in turn, is sometimes focalized through physics and
chemistry, as in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797/1803).
But sometimes it is focused through the life sciences, with physics and chemistry being
part of the life sciences rather than the hard sciences, as in First
Outline for a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), which itself is nit
one but several “systems.” Even from the beginning, then, and despite the smooth system
he articulates in On University Studies, Schelling’s practice
is always mobilized by what he calls “asystasy.” As he later says in “On the Nature of
Philosophy as Science” (1821), “the idea of finding a system of human knowledge, or ...
of contemplating human knowledge within a system, within a form of coexistence,
presupposes, of course, that originally and of itself it does not exist in a system,
hence that it is an ... [asystaton], ... something that is in inner
conflict” (210).

13. Leaving aside Schelling, then, I focus on Hegel, who wants to construct a
comprehensive, complexly articulated architecture of knowledge rather than a “rhapsody”
(Kant, Reason 691). According to Karl Rosenkranz, during the
early Jena years when many of the elements of the encylopedia were introduced and when
Schelling (or one side of him) was still committed to the Identity Philosophy, Schelling
worked out the critical foundations of absolute philosophy in synchronic fashion, while
Hegel set to work developing it as a “cycle of sciences” (qtd. by Vater 82). Yet the
cycle is not necessarily the circle, and Hegel’s multiple, supplementary figures for his
system compromise its smooth ambitions by entangling the architectonic within the
temporal and the body within its organic complexities. This paper will explore three
such figures: the line, the circle, and the body. Together they bring Hegel closer to,
and yet mark his difference from, another idea of the encyclopedia which forms part of
the contemporary context of Hegel’s project, but is at the opposite extreme from Kant’s
architectonic: Novalis’ “encyclopedistics.”

14. In Novalis’ Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (1798), which
despite its organization in fragments has its own systematic principles, the units of
the system are also emergent disciplines and fields. But the relations of parts and
whole are tangled and rhizomatic, not hierarchical and smooth. The whole cannot
determine the part as in architectonic; but unlike in an aggregative system, the part
does not remain finite and in its own sphere, as it possesses generative consequences
for the whole of knowledge. “Application of the system to the parts,” Novalis writes,
“and the parts to the system and the parts to the parts” (#460).

15. For Novalis, then, the Encyclopedia is not an organization of knowledge but an
asystaton that is a thought-environment for mixtures. Mixtures were
anathema to Kant, who felt that each science should be placed in “a special system so
that it constitutes a science of its own kind, in order to guard against the uncertainty
arising from mixing things together” (Metaphysical Foundations,
9). Indeed Kant even proposes disentangling troublesome subsystems from the whole so as
to purify them and then reinsert them into the whole (12-13). But as Walter Moser says,
“mixture” was one of the key concepts in chemistry at the time, and chemistry occupied a
privileged position among the early Romantics “as a discourse model that becomes the
source” of “interdiscursive translation” (16, 6). This translation, in turn, realizes
the creative, and not simply critical, potential of a tangled system. And what Novalis
provides is a toolkit for such translation that involves “potentiation” and
“application” as related procedures in the “encyclopedization of a science” (Novalis #161). Through the “vertical” procedure of potentiation (Moser 12) or “genuine raising to a higher power, every science can pass over into a higher
philosophical science” (Novalis #487). It is application, however, that allows for the
creation of a new science out of an already existing one (Moser 13), for instance
psychopathology or psychoanalysis out of pathology, as we shall see. The goal of
encyclopedic education is the “encyclopedization of a science” that occurs when the
analogical implications of a science or even a “molecule of science” are potentiated so
that the empirical, instead of being determined by the transcendental, retroacts upon it
(Novalis #161, #489). The key here is analogy as a constitutive and not just the
regulative procedure it is in Kant. “A science becomes applied,” according to Novalis,
“if it serves as the analogous model and stimulus” for the development of another
science, a process that is reciprocal, because it is also “the self-(post) development”
of this other science (#487). To be sure, mixtures were not the goal from which Hegel
started. But his system, unfolding philosophy through a series of histories and
attempting to wrest the transcendental from the empirical, is nothing if not mixed.

Circles Within Circles

16. Let us turn, then, to Hegel’s figures for system. The most prominent is the circle,
which goes back to the root meaning of enkyklos paideia, and which he
defines through its radii “as that which takes account of the difference within it and
so reaches a complete determinateness” (Nature 33). One might
think of the circle as a smooth structure. Yet this is no ordinary circle. The
philosophical encyclopedia consists of parts, each of which “is a circle of totality
containing itself within itself, “ though the “philosophical idea is also within each
particular determinacy or element. ” “The circle of Nature” is thus only one circle in
Philosophy. The whole is then “a circle of circles” (Encyclopedia 51; Nature 2): an immensely complicated
structure like Milton’s cosmos: “Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb” (Paradise Lost VIII.84).

17. The image of circles within circles differs from the smoother image of the building or
group of buildings that Kant, despite conceiving the whole as a “body” (Reason 691), also uses for knowledge. For Kant “every science is of itself a
system” and though we may move from one building to another each is a “freestanding
building” (Judgment 252-3). Hegel’s figure, by contrast, has
several hazards. First, while the circle is a figure of self-enclosure and containment,
he sees as a breach the proceeding of one circle into another, which in
more modern terms is the process of mediation or “the adapting ... of findings from one
level to another” (Jameson 39-40). Hegel writes: “The individual circle thus ruptures
itself because it is in itself a totality, it breaks through the limits of its own
elements and establishes another sphere” (Encyclopedia 51).
Although the circle of circles is meant to contain multiplicity in unity, what Hegel
describes here is an exceeding of containment. To be sure, this is in one sense the
famous procedure of Aufhebung or sublation. Hegel annotates this
process further, when he says that sciences which are not positive
“recognize their concepts as finite,” thus undergoing “a transition into a higher
sphere” (54). A rupture, however, is also an infraction, a breaking of one circle into
another, or rather of both into each other. Elsewhere I have described one such instance
of mediation in the last section of the Philosophy of Nature,
where Hegel projects his own three-part dialectic onto the physiological schema of
sensibility, irritability and reproduction that was common at the time (Rajan
“(In)Digestible Material”). Reading physiological processes in philosophical language,
Hegel produces a psychosomatics of Spirit that is both a psychoanalysis in embryo and
one of the new disciplines that Novalis was fond of imagining: “pathological philosophy”
(#638). [7]

18. As this example indicates, there is no guarantee that the breaking of the circle, the
transition from one domain to another that Kant sees as incidental, is a transition into
a higher sphere. The emergence of psychoanalysis from philosophy’s bringing
of “Idealism” into the science of medicine is a transformative breaking of the circles
of both empirical medicine and philosophy itself. It occurs precisely through
potentiation: the elevation of physiology and medicine from empirical into philosophical
sciences. And it also occurs through analogy: the analogical application of philosophy
to physiology, which produces a new science through what Novalis calls
“encyclopedization.” But this transition of one sphere into another establishes
“another” and not a “higher” sphere. Indeed, rather than following an a
priori logic, there is something of the accidental about it. And moreover it
moves in more than one direction, inasmuch as physiology can also be analogically
applied to philosophy to produce pathological philosophy, resulting in “the self-(post)
development” of philosophy (Novalis #487). No doubt this is not exactly an accident
Hegel wanted. Hence he must, so to speak, burn his work, so that “like the phoenix”
Nature can “come forth from this externality rejuvenated as Spirit” and “reconcile
itself with itself” (Nature 444). But then Hegel also embraces
such accidents, which are built into his seeing “substance as subject” and therefore,
crucially, as “negativity.”As he writes in the Phenomenology:
“The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together,
is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But
that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, ... should attain an
existence of its own and a separate freedom –this is the tremendous power of the
negative” (10, 18-19).

19. Related to the “proceeding” of one circle into another is a further problem, which is
the entanglement of micro and macrosystems. Where material encyclopedias move from the
bottom up, trying to fit individual systems into a system of the whole which never
really overcomes the empiricism of aggregation, Idealism starts deductively with a whole
into which the parts are supposedly fitted. Nevertheless, Hegel includes many of the
minute details we might expect to find in material encyclopedias: discussions of
meteors, limestone, lizards, and experiments in natural philosophy that show his
familiarity with British journals of the time. The sheer complexity of Hegel’s system
results in a disseminative multiplication of the parts within the whole. [8] Moreover,
circles become “spheres,” a word that Hegel uses to describe both concepts like
existence and negativity and fields of knowledge such as physics and mechanics. Spheres
are not quite circles: whereas the circle is a two-dimensional schema, the sphere has a
volume and “mass” (Nature 79), which Hegel must struggle to
keep under control. Thus as M.J. Petry explains, the “spheres” are supposed to be
“levels” in a “hierarchy” which is like the Chain of Being (21-39). The “sphere of
physics” is part of the “sphere of Nature” (Hegel, Nature 26,
23), and “each sphere ... complete[s] itself by passing into another higher one” (21), a
logic Hegel evokes in the “transition” from Nature to Spirit at the end of the Philosophy of Nature (445). But this logic of subsumption can
equally be one of complication, in which the levels risk becoming spheres in their own
right. For as Schelling says, using the same term as Hegel, within each “determinate
sphere of formation” “other spheres are again formed, and in these spheres others”
(First Outline 43-4). The result is intimated by Goethe, when
he says that sciences “destroy themselves in two ways: by the breadth they reach and by
the depth they plumb” (305).

20. The logic is that of Leibniz’ Monadology, adapted by
Schelling in The First Outline into a “dynamic atomism” (21)
that doubles as a physics of knowledge. For Leibniz the monad is both a simple unity and
is infinitely subdivisible into further monads. Kant resolved this paradox by arguing
that monads are not to be conceived as physically filling a space but rather as spheres
or “orbits of activity”: it is thus not the actual substance of the monad but its sphere
of activity that is infinitely divided (Physical Monadology
53-7). [9] Ideally for Hegel
these multiple monads or spheres will be unified by the fiction of their
“pre-established harmony”; thus for Leibniz individual monads, though self-contained,
are all supposedly comprehended in the supreme Monad which is God (or absolute
knowledge). But inversely, as Schelling recognizes, these monads, which externally
appear as simple unities, are infinitely subdivisible into further and further monads,
each with its own life (Leibniz 261, 266, 268).

21. Thus even as Hegel’s macrosystems (of nature, art etc.) are compounded into ever
larger unities, they are also infinitely particularized into microsystems with their own
logic and so are complexly self-differing. In this way the sphere of “Organics” in the
Philosophy of Nature is subdivided into the geological,
vegetable and animal organisms, which can be placed in a hierarchy, but between which
there are also rhizomatic connections. The animal organism is studied in terms of the
sphere of physiology, which contains the sphere of pathology, which is inapplicable to
the geological organism and unique to the animal (429). British Idealism is in many ways
less tangled than its German parent, and thinkers such as Erasmus Darwin, John
Abernethy, Joseph Henry Green, and (less successfully) Coleridge, contained pathology
within physiology as a negative illustration of the laws of normal life, with the
understanding that these laws could be better understood through deviations from them.
But while this may also be Hegel’s aim, Hegel never returns from the pathological to the
normal, as The Philosophy of Nature ends with a section
entitled “The Disease of the Individual” that derails the intended transition from
Nature to Spirit. This last section becomes an accident detached from what circumscribes
it, but one that affects the substance of Hegel’s thought precisely because that
substance is actualized through a subject. The problem confronting Hegel is not unlike
the dis-integration of the macro- by the micropedia in the work of his materialist
rivals. But it has this difference, that the connections or disconnections that remain
external in material encyclopedias are internalized as part of self-consciousness in
encyclopedics, or perhaps, internalized as part of the text’s unconscious.

The Endangered Line

22. This brings us to the next problem, the entanglement of the of the circle and line.
The encyclopedia is not just a spatial curriculum that one traverses from the outside,
but a process of Bildung or inner development. It is a “path”
the “length” of which “has to be endured,” since knowledge is “a necessary
and complete process of becoming” (Phenomenology 17, 20). Hegel
criticized Schelling for being insufficiently dialectical (History of
Philosophy III. 334, 341-3), and by dialectic he did not simply mean a form of
argumentation but a profoundly temporal experience: a process of remembering and working
through, of engaging the ideal with the real, and a transposition of the philosophical
into the historical. Unlike the Schelling of Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature (1797/1803), System of Transcendental Idealism
(1800), Bruno (1802), and On University
Studies, (1803), Hegel could not conceive of the eternal and temporal or the
ideal and real as synchronic, in the manner of Blake’s fourfold vision. [10] Thus to a degree Hegel’s distinction between the sciences of
nature and spirit corresponds to Schelling’s distinction between the real (or life)
sciences and the ideal sciences such as philosophy, mathematics, and religion (University Studies 103-4). But for Hegel, as for the post-Jena
Schelling of the Freedom essay (1809), the emergence of freedom
from necessity must be earned through the struggle of nature to become spirit, which
occurs along a “path,” “road” or temporal line.

23. This struggle is not only thematized through what Findlay calls the “dialectical
journey” (Phenomenology 528); it also provides
the structure for Hegel’s organization of knowledge. For if the eighteenth century sees
a “temporalizing of the Chain of Being” (Lovejoy 242-3, 271-80), Hegel also temporalizes
the cycle of disciplines along this evolutionary Chain of Being. [11] Thus the third
section of the Philosophy of Nature takes in geology,
meteorology, botany, physiology and medicine, among others. These sciences are part of
the broader system of “Organics,” which is preceded by mechanics and physics. The three
together comprise the sphere of Nature, which is a sphere in a scale of disciplines that
parallels the Chain of Being, since their subject-matter proceeds from the inorganic to
the organic, and from lower to higher organizations along this chain. The Philosophy of Nature, in turn, is a level that is surpassed by the
sciences of Spirit. Altogether the cycle of learning in which consciousness learns how
to become Spirit unfolds as an ascent from matter to Spirit, or necessity to freedom,
through the progression from the real to the ideal sciences. Indeed “Nature” herself
learns to be Spirit by proceeding through the phenomena, from molluscs to animals, that
are the objects of the various sciences. Here Hegel is totally unlike the Schelling of
the lectures On University Studies, whose arrangement of
chapters on disciplines is random rather than following a thematic progression anchored
in the development of a subject.

24. Not that there are no other systems which thematize a progressing ‘line’ of knowledge,
for instance that projected by Coleridge, consisting of Logic, Natural [Philosophy] and
Theology" (Notebooks #5417). Indeed, working to put the
ever-troublesome life sciences in their a priori place within this
architectonic of knowledge, his friend and executor Joseph Henry Green more clearly
executes Coleridge’s project of absorbing physiological into political “constitution,”
or Nature into Spirit, by following Vital Dynamics (1840) with
Mental Dynamics or Groundwork of a Professional Education
(1847) and then Spiritual Philosophy (1865), as a means to the
Bildung of Coleridge’s “clerisy.” Green, though more immersed
in Schelling, had read some Hegel and studied with Solger in Berlin in 1817, the year
Solger helped to bring Hegel to the University of Berlin. Nevertheless it is only Hegel
who traverses this “road” as a “pathway of doubt” (Phenomenology 49), in which the sciences are not analytic systems but
phenomenological expressions of what, in an almost fantastical prosopopeia, he calls
“Nature’s” struggle to become Spirit. Thus, even if against their grain, the sciences
form what Novalis calls a “pathological philosophy” in which each science is profoundly
lacking, and must “shatter” the “inadequate form” of its “circle,” only to expose its
own inadequacy (Nature 443).

25. So as Nature, in Hegel’s personification or self-projection, struggles for
self-consciousness, consciousness too is exposed to its human nature in the shapes or
Gestaltungen (Phenomenology 9) that it
gives itself in its sciences. Hence the line that Hegel wants to organize smoothly
within the synthetic paradigm of the dialectic is beset by accidents that disclose the
“tremendous power of the negative.” Indeed this “road,” which he calls an “inwardizing
[Er-Innerung] and Calvary” of Spirit (Phenomenology 51, 493), is littered with such accidents, which Hegel, after
“tarrying” with the “negative” (19), tries unconvincingly to elide through various
figural somersaults. For instance as the Philosophy of Nature
disastrously concludes with "The Disease of the Individual,"
Hegel claims that the “goal of Nature,” mired as it is in “an ever-increasing wealth of
detail,” is to “destroy itself ... to consume itself like the phoenix in order to come
forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit” (444). Similarly at the end of the
Aesthetics, almost all of which is about how this discipline
of thinking beautifully falls afoul of the actual history of art, Hegel famously
proclaims the end of art. The circle is likewise one of these figures that tries to
perform what the Idea and the Concept cannot do. The circle is “the line returning into
itself” and the “paralysis” of the dimensions of time such that present, past and future
are “closed together in a unity,” their distinctions “sublated” (Nature 43-4). It is “the path of a purely uniform motion” (70).
In the closure of the circle the point “has been already at the place it is reaching”
(43-4); the “end” is already in the “beginning” (Phenomenology
10).

26. Yet this closure of the circle is a form of damage control exerted on the line, path,
or journey. For the line figures a form of experience in which the immanent unfolding of
the “Idea” in time and history risks removing the transcendental guarantees that exist
in the early Schelling’s synchronicity of the eternal and temporal, or “true” and
“appearing Nature” (Ideas 272). Hence Hegel finds the circle
limited as well as complete, referring to each circular totalization as an “inadequate
form” and suggesting that there is something simplistic in the circle that “holds its
moments together” (Nature 443; Phenomenology 18-19). This is to say that if Hegel needs to repair the line
with the circle, he conversely needs the line to supply the dialectic, or as Schelling
will later call it “realism,” [12]
that is lacking in what Hegel critiques as Absolute Idealism. In the Preface to the
Phenomenology, which famously caused the rift with Schelling,
though it also formatively changed Schelling’s work, Hegel calls Absolute Idealism “the
night in which all cows are black” (9). He describes it as a “monochromatic formalism”
that ignores “the living Substance” as a “self-originating, self-differentiating wealth
of shapes” and “begins straight away with absolute knowledge” (9-10, 16). The “long way”
that Spirit must “travel,” the line as opposed to the circle, figures the process of
remembering and working through that is the labour of the negative (10, 15). [13] The circle is
nothing without the line, which undoes the circle.

The Nervous Body

27. Let us turn now to our final figure, the body which, like the circle, projects a
system that holds its moments together. Thus in the Phenomenology Hegel writes that Spirit “articulates its body into a variety
of functions, and allots one particular part for only one function” (197). In the Philosophy of Nature he echoes Kant’s contrast between knowledge
that is “heaped together” and knowledge as an “articulated” whole which, like the
“animal body,” grows “internally” and not “externally” by “contingent addition” (Kant,
Reason 591). In the same vein of an external and aggregated
vs. internal and integrated growth, Hegel too argues that plants grow only in size, but
when the animal increases in size it “remains one shape” (Nature 304).

28. Like Kant, then, Hegel wants to conceive the body as a whole that keeps parts in their
place. Thus implicitly he aligns material encyclopedias with the aggregative structure
of the vegetable body, while his own philosophical encyclopedia is like the animal body
that grows internally and retains “one shape.” But does not such a unification become
coercive when it is extended to the body politic or the body of knowledge? And indeed
can Hegel uphold his analogy? For Kant’s body, as we have seen, is aesthetic or at best
anatomical, where anatomy maps the volume of organs on a flat surface. But Hegel is
sensitive to the difference between structure and process. Describing the “ordinary view
of anatomy” as “the knowledge of the parts of the body regarded as inanimate,” Hegel
writes in his “Preface: On Scientific Cognition” that in anatomy we “do not as yet
possess the subject-matter itself,” since we do not know “the particulars” (Phenomenology 1). He later adds that in such a system, “the organism
is apprehended from the abstract aspect of a dead existence; its moments so taken
pertain to anatomy and the corpse, not to cognition and the living organism.” “The
moments have really ceased to be for they cease to be processes.” It is
only within these processes, within their transitions (to pick up the word Kant
dismisses), that “anatomical parts,” or by analogy disciplines, “have a meaning,” since
only then can “what is forcibly detached and fixed as an individual system” be returned
to being a “fluid moment” (166).

29. Moreover, unlike Kant, Hegel also writes at length on the real body in the last major
division of his Philosophy of Nature on “Organics.” And it is
the physiological and not the anatomical body that he treats, breaking the circle in
which the earlier Schelling had closed off the dangers of physiology by synchronizing it
with anatomy (University Studies 141). As we have seen, for
Hegel the animal body (which includes the human) is distinguished from the plant in
terms of the unity of the animal as an “organism” vs. the structure of the plant as an
“aggregate” (Nature 394). Plants grow only in size, whereas
when the animal increases in size it “remains one shape” (304). Correspondingly plants
“fall apart” into “a number of individuals, the whole plant being rather the basis
(Boden) for these individuals than a subjective unity of
members” (303). The plant “is thus impotent to hold its members in its power” and indeed
does not have “true members [Gliedern]” (276); or as Hegel says
elsewhere “every branch is a new plant and not at all ... just a single member” (Aesthetics I.137). By contrast, in the animal organism members are
subordinate to the whole, even as the whole “is articulated into parts that are
separate and distinct,” so that “each member is reciprocally end and
means” (Nature 303, 377). Yet as a “totality of articulated
members” (377) that respects differences the animal body is beset by problems, the first
of which is its multiple, overlapping systems: “three” systems, like the Encyclopedia itself, or as Hegel admits, “a good many more” (Nature 359; Phenomenology 166). While the
body “contain[s]” these systems, their very unification “produce[s] a general, concrete
interpenetration” of systems by “one another,” so that a particular system is not
confined to its place “but permeates all the other systems of the organism” (Nature 372; Phenomenology 162). The
relation of parts to the whole here is dangerously close to Novalis’ application of the
parts to the whole. This is to say that unity itself may be something of a
pharmakon, if we allow one system, for instance physiology, to
affect another, such as the body politic, which is also discussed in terms of the
biopolitical language of “members.” [14]

30. Indeed Schelling emphasizes precisely such “accidents”that occur through integration
in a body, when he uses the body as a figure for complex systems. Schelling writes that
the body contains multiple systems (“digestive etc.”), and favourably contrasts this
tangled body to Kant’s use of geometry as a model for philosophy: “It is as though one
preferred a stereometrically regular crystal to the human body for the reason that the
former has no possibility of falling ill, while the latter hosts germs of every possible
illness” ( “On the Nature of Philosophy” 212-13). Working out of the same speculative
image cluster in which “a system or organ” establishing itself in “isolation” is
condemned as disease (Hegel, Nature 428), Schelling had already
attributed a positive value to disease in the Freedom essay
(1809): “An individual body part [Glied], like the eye, is only
possible within the whole of an organism; nonetheless, it has its own life for itself,
indeed, its own kind of freedom, which it obviously proves through the disease of which
it is capable” (18). But if it is Schelling who ambivalently valorizes this separateness
as freedom, it is Hegel who allows, through his concept of “fluidity,” for the obstinacy
of the part to have consequences for the whole.

31. While there is no space here for an extensive reading of the section on the “Animal
Organism,” suffice it to say that just as Schelling’s dynamic atomism doubles as a
physics of knowledge, so too Hegel’s discussions of the body double as a physiology, or
indeed pathography, of the “full body of articulated cognition” (Phenomenology 9). [15] This is all the more so given
the use of the word “systems” throughout the section on the body, and given that the
same words and concepts are often used both in the epistemic and physiological
registers. Thus the aggregate and the organism describe plants vs. animals but also the
form that Hegel wants a science to take: it “must present itself as an organism” rather
than being “a simple aggregate” (Nature 6). Indeed, it is
because of his investment in organic, inward knowledge with deep rather than surface,
metamorphic connections that Hegel thinks poorly of plants. In a similar mirroring of
the literal and metaphorical, Hegel concludes the Phenomenology
by saying that through its long journey the Self has “to penetrate and digest
(verdauen) the entire wealth of its substance” (492). In the
section on the organism in the Philosophy of Nature he then has
an extensive account of digestion that is overdetermined by psycho-philosophical
concerns that make it impossible not to apply his physiology to his philosophy. In short
the Philosophy of Nature, this “weak link in the dialectical
chain” (Gasché 3), is a mise-en-abime of the Encyclopedia itself. It
is, as Hegel says, “the Idea in the form of otherness” (Nature 13), and as such generates a number of reflexive figures for the
functioning of the larger system.

32. This is not to say with Werner Hamacher, who is similarly sensitive to Hegel’s work as
“writing,” that Hegel’s philosophy, “closed as it is in order to round out the circle of
the encyclopedic system,” draws “every critique which contests it, every new reading
which addresses it, back into its own circle” (1). On the contrary Hegel, tarrying as he
does with the negative, is pushed again and again to break the circle that he wants to
close, and to expose his auto-encyclopedia of Spirit to its auto-immunity. Auto-immunity
is Derrida’s word for the tendency of an organism to destroy “its own immunitary
protections,” which he sees as a kind of vitality (Rogues 124,
55). And for Hegel too this auto-immunity is precisely what characterizes the organism,
even though he hopes to endure and overcome it: “A stone cannot become diseased,” but
the “living creature is always exposed to danger, always bears within itself an other,
but can endure this contradiction, which the inorganic cannot” (Nature 429, 274). Or as he also says, noting the specific character of an
organism as an inside facing an outside, a “wound ... only becomes dangerous through
exposure to air. Organic life alone is characterized by its perpetual self-restoration
in the process of its destruction” (109).

33. As a mirror within the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Nature
generates a number of figures that react on the larger system. Let me briefly touch on
three in the section on the animal body: digestion, disease and fluidity. First,
digestion or “assimilation” (381): the “adaptation of the non-organic to the purposes of
the living creature” (381), which Hegel also calls “mediation” (402). We often extend
the verbs “digest” and “assimilate” to knowledge. Indeed, repeating his opposition of
the organism to the non-organic, Hegel produces a peculiarly vexed metaphor for
knowledge as a struggle with resistant material: “all externality is non-organic; as,
e.g., for the individual, the sciences are his non-organic nature,” which he has “to
make his own” (276). Throughout the Philosophy of Nature, which
Hegel describes as an “alien existence” that is “refractory towards the unity of the
Notion” (3, 444), we see the pathos and agon of Hegel’s attempt to
organize these sciences within a larger system so as to convert
“externality” into a “self-like unity” (393). These attempts at
organization, at accessing “structure, as alive” (377), are always bound up
with some kind of pain. Take, for instance, the weirdly catachrestic mediation of
anatomical into psycho-philosophical language in Hegel’s glossing of a description of
bones that he borrows from Autenreith’s Handbuch der empirischen
menschlichen Physiologie (1801):

‘Bones, simply on account of the
larger number of their vessels in general possess more vitality’ (in comparison with
cartilages); ‘and this is evidenced by their susceptibility to inflammation and
pathological changes ....’ Bone, i.e. the sensibility belonging to shape as such is,
like the wood of the plant, the simple and therefore dead force which is not yet a
process, but abstract reflection-into-self. At the same time, however, it is the dead
force reflected into self. (361)

Or take the neuropathically intense,
psychoanalytically prescient description of how the “sensibility which has withdrawn
into itself,” produces a “system not yet separated out,” the sympathetic nervous system.
“This system forms ganglia [Nervenknoten] which can be regarded
as little brains in the abdomen.” Here according to Autenreith digestion “is withdrawn
from our control” into an absent body, a lapse that Hegel glosses as follows: “In the
sommanbulistic state ...self-consciousness is turned inwards [and] this internal
vitality passes into the ganglia, and into the brain of this dark independent
self-consciousness” (364). If the passage on bones is an example of mediation, the
analysis of the sympathetic nervous system is something else: one of those accidents to
which Hegel refers, which unsettles his intentions and is part of the “self-(post)
development” of philosophy, inasmuch as another “sphere” is beginning to be formed
within physiology, namely psychoanalysis.

34. In contrast to the more thoughtful, recursive term “inwardizing” or
Er-Innerung, digestion names an aggressive process of sublating
these “externalities” or “accidents” that assault Spirit in Hegel’s reading of the
scientific manuals of his time. Indeed the aggression of philosophy’s attempt to
organize the “non-organic” material of physiology is evident in Hegel’s account of
digestion as a process in which the “appetitive organism” is turned “outwards” and
“provided with weapons” (393). The organism “overcome[s] and digest[s]” “the object or
the negative” into its “subjectivity,” so as to master its own unwanted
“involvement with the outer world” (395): an aggression that is bound to
fail, given Hegel’s description of the subject itself as pure negativity, or as he also
says “lack” (385). But what happens when the animal cannot fully digest
what is external? Elsewhere I have described the complex psycho-metaphorics of
digestion, in which it is not clear whether “the non-organic ‘potency’” (403) is outside
or also inside. The animal must digest what is external, but is “repell[ed]” by itself
because of its “entanglement with the outer thing,” and so must also cast out this
outside that is inside. The “conclusion of the process of assimilation” is thus
“excretion,” by which the animal, instead of making the external internal, “makes itself
external to itself” (404): “Excrement has, therefore, no other significance than this,
that the organism recognizing its error, gets rid of its entanglement with outside
things” (405), and thus “rid[s] itself of [its] lack of self-confidence” (403).

35. But as this oddly ethical and psychological language indicates, this outside was never
fully outside. On the one hand, excretion has to follow digestion in normal assimilation
and so is a sign that digestive appropriation has succeeded: excrement, we are told,
“consists mainly of digested matter, or what the organism itself has added to the
digested material” (405). But on the other hand, excretion also seems a form of
indigestion, since “even in the healthiest animals” the excrement is not “homogeneous”
but contains “undecomposed food” (405), which is to say that excrement is a rem(a)inder
of failed assimilation. [16] No wonder, then, that in
digestion “the organism in angrily opposing itself to the outer world is divided within
itself” (402). Or that digestion proves to be a turning on oneself, as the “organism
converts its own members into a non-organic nature, ... lives on itself and produces its
own self,” becoming a “self-like unity” only through a repression in which digestion is,
in effect, a form of abjection (377, 393). If philosophy is what the organism has added
to external matter, then the sheer weirdness of the way Hegel catachrestically converts
matter into the language of Spirit makes philosophy a kind of undigested excrement. The
result is that the text, whose attempt to heal the wound of nature recalls the genre of
spiritual autobiography, is more accurately described as a pathography of the
philosophical spirit.

36. The vexed nature of digestion opens up another sphere in the discussion of the animal
organism, namely disease, which occurs when one of the body’s “systems or organs ...
establishes itself in isolation [sich fur sich festsetzt] and
persists in its particular activity against the activity of the whole” (428). Disease,
in other words, is the part’s resistance to being digested by the whole, or the whole’s
failure to digest its parts. Indeed Hegel goes so far as to describe disease as “an
indigestibility in general” (433), and the language of toxicity crosses between
digestion and illness. Digestion, “the power” of life “over its non-organic
object,” is an “infection” (395), a curious word, since it is not clear whether the food
or the body is being infected. On the other hand, the medicine for disease is an
“indigestible substance” that forces the organism to rally and digest
what is external to it (434, 436).

37. These ambivalences towards digestion bring Hegel closer than we might expect to
Schelling, who, as we have seen, confers a value on disease as the freedom of the part
from the whole (although he too is not without ambivalence). For on the surface Hegel
does seem more committed than his erstwhile friend to the containment of members in a
whole, and less inclined to say, as Schelling does, that “disease is a completely
relative concept” and that what is disease in one organism may be part of another
organism’s functioning (First Outline 160). But it is
significant that in his allegorization of the stages through which disease passes Hegel
translates the physiological term “irritability” into a word with great value in his
philosophical system: negativity. Combining terms from the physiology of Haller,
Blumenbach, and Kielmeyer– terms that had preoccupied him from the Jena years and the
Phenomenology onwards–eHegel postulates three “moments” in
the normal organism that are also moments in a disease: sensibility, irritability and
reproduction. In effect, he then maps his three-part dialectic onto these moments. [17] In sensibility the organism as
“being-within-self” verges on the passive, on “insensibility” (Phenomenology 161; Nature 361). Likewise in
disease, in the phase of sensibility the disease is “virtually (an sich)
present, but without any actual morbidity” (Nature 433). At the
threshold of sensibility, the organism arrives at a “moment of difference” in the
“nervous system,” which is “directed outwards and involved in external relationships”
(361-5). This leads to the next phase, namely irritability, associated with the muscular
rather than nervous system, where the organism is involved with “difference” and an
“active maintenance of self” (365, 359). Finally Hegel draws on Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, which was influential for Kant’s notion of teleology,
to theorize his third moment of “reproduction.” In the normal state reproduction simply
means the organism’s reproduction of its parts or of further organisms, or in an
interesting variant, the constructive instinct of birds, for instance, building nests
(Phenomenology 161; Nature 407). But
tellingly, in the pathography of The Philosophy of Nature’s
last section, the only reproduction that the organism can manage is excrement, as if to
dis-figure teleology and epigenesis as the organism’s progressive self-organization over
time.

38. Of particular interest here is the second moment of irritability and the form it takes
in the section on disease. For irritability as difference can be simply aggressive:
plants are sensitive, animals irritable. It is in only connection with disease that it
becomes associated with the more self-scrutinizing language of negativity. Here
irritability takes on a psychic dimension as the part’s separation of itself from the
whole: “There is established in the self and in opposition to it as universal, a
determinateness which makes its own self into a fixed self,” and now the organism,
concentrated in a part of itself, is “restricted to itself” and “possesses within its
own self the negative of itself” (Nature 433, 438). The self is
“turned against its structure” and the “negative thing is the structure itself” (429).
While this obstinacy of the part is not desirable for Hegel’s architectonic notion of
the body, it cannot be wholly undesirable, given that the negative (albeit as negativity
rather than determinate negation) is the motor of Hegel’s system.

39. In short, the separation of the part from the whole is seen as disease, but it is this
“indigestibility” which seems the condition of possibility for a negativity to which
Hegel is deeply committed. Schelling’s discussion elsewhere of “indecomposable”
substances provides an interesting parallel to Hegel’s indigestible material. Working
out of Kant’s argument that anything which is divisible cannot be “free from
composition” or utterly “simple” (Physical Monadology 55),
Schelling distinguishes between “decomposable” substances like soil, and those that are
“absolute[ly] indecomposable” or “absolute[ly] incomposable.” Perhaps confusingly, he
insists that the latter are also “absolute[ly] composable”: “Indecomposability and
absolute composability ... always coexist” (First Outline
29-31). Schelling’s point is to keep indecomposability as a way for something to resist
appropriation, to preserve its integrity, while allowing that such dead-ends, which do
not fit into a system, are also always be composable, capable of being dissolved and
dissipated in order to be recreated. Hence just as “nature makes the absolutely
indecomposable substances composable through decomposition, so the absolutely
indecomposable substances, conversely, are inserted once again into the universal
circulation of matter through composition” (31). Schelling’s terms, developed as they
are in the subject-less realm of physics, lack the affect of Hegel’s indigestibility,
whose environment is the psycho-physiology of the organism. But the point bears on
Hegel: the indigestible that resists assimilation, causing a dis-ease within the system
or even an absolute stoppage, can also be decomposed and put back into intellectual
circulation.

40. One such undigested or uncomposed remnant is the curious passage on the sympathetic
nervous system as withdrawn into a “somnambulistic state” that conceals a “dark
independent self-consciousness” (Nature 364). Like the bits of
information in the EB, Hegel’s translation of the ganglia into
the terms of mesmerism as well as philosophy is neither digested nor cast out from his
larger system. But from a later perspective we can compose it in another order, where it
becomes part of “the self-(post) development” of Romantic philosophy as a laboratory for
psychoanalysis, at that time a “system not yet separated out” from physiology (364).

41. In Novalis’ terms, this encyclopedization of a molecule of knowledge becomes possible
by “applying” the physiological concept of “fluidity” to knowledge, thus potentializing
it in the epistemic register. Fluidity is an important concept for both Hegel and
Schelling. In Schelling’s First Outline the universal fluid is
the unconditioned (Unbedingt) that precedes Nature’s composition of
products or “figures” (26, 27n), which are “bound” forms that must be decomposed or
unbound in order to be composed again, or taken up “into the universal process of
organization” (31). For Schelling, as Coleridge recognized in adapting him, this Primary
Imagination at the level of Nature is the ground and analogue for the workings of the
Secondary Imagination mediated by mind (Biographia 304). More
agonistically, Hegel adapts this fluidity to disease, thinking the part-whole
relationship through his ambivalence about chronic vs. acute illness. For in disease, as
we have seen, one system isolates itself and establishes itself against the whole, “the
fluidity and all-pervading process of which is thus obstructed,” whereas in health all
the body’s “organs are fluid in the universal” (Nature
428).

42. But the problem, which has ramifications for cognitive as well as physiological
behaviour, is that this “derange[ment]” of the organism by one of its parts can involve
either chronic or acute illness. In chronic illness, the disease “remains in one organ,”
while other functions are “quite unimpaired, ” but in acute illness the entire organism
is “morbidly affected”(432). And Hegel is uncertain which is less disastrous. On the one
hand, as long as the disease “is peculiar to” and “confined” within “one particular
system” such as the philosophy of nature, “it is easier to cure because only one organ
is irritated or depressed.” “The system has only to be extricated from its entanglement
with its non-organic nature and kept within bounds” (433), as Hegel tries to do in
moving on from nature to spirit. On the other hand, chronic disease is also particularly
associated with obstruction, as in “hardening of the liver” (432). We can understand
this through Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of pathological behaviour as something “rigid” and
not “integrated into a coherent and flexible field of meaning” (Wild xv; Merleau-Ponty
86, 178). Hence when “one system” makes itself “the independent centre of activity...
the organism too can no longer, as an independent whole, come to itself,” which is to
say that the disease has not really been isolated in a part. So Hegel also says that
medicine prefers acute illness, since if the whole organism is affected, “the activity
of the whole organism too, can be released” (Nature 432). Acute
illness restores fluidity, facilitating a cure through what is, in effect, a kathartic
“general, concrete interpenetration” of the systems earlier described (372), but with
the proviso that until this katharsis happens, the rigidity, not unlike uncomposability,
also protects what the existing field of meaning is not ready to integrate.

43. It is clear that Hegel himself cannot confine intellectual dis-ease, the restlessness
of the negative, in one system. The distinction between acute and chronic illness is
followed by an uncomposed Zusatz “A third form of disease is
that which originates in the universal subject, especially man. These are diseases
of the soul ... which can even result in death” (432). The point simply sits
there, in a silent confinement, briefly offered as information rather than knowledge, an
uncomposed remnant of Hegel’s encyclopedic reading in the scientific literature of his
time. Yet diseases of the soul return in another system, the Anthropology, which is part
of the philosophy of Spirit. But conversely, it also seems that neither Hegel nor
Schelling are quite ready to release the depression of one system into the whole. For
even the latter’s discussion of disease in the First Outline,
whose germinal importance Krell has analysed (103-15), lies uncomposed in an appendix,
and the larger work in which it is released, namely the unpublished 1815 Ages of the World, is not a whole.

44. Stepping back, we see in the tremendous complexity of Hegel’s Encyclopedia what
Bertalanffy calls an open rather than closed system. For Bertalanffy open systems emerge
on the threshold between physics and biology. Whereas physics and mathematics model
closed systems, what he calls “organismic” biology makes possible a system characterized
by “continuous change, regulation, and apparent teleology,” but constantly thwarted and
complicated by feedback loops (6, 89-92). But Bertalanffy provides an imperfect parallel
on two grounds. In the feedback loop information is fed back and recombined till “the
goal or target is reached,” so that his open systems are still characterized by
homeostasis or the maintenance of balance (43-6). Second, in Hegel’s and Schelling’s
turn away from Spinoza, substance is subject. But for Bertalanffy though substance is
process, it is not subject; the open system in Bertalanffy or Deleuze has a
subject-less, absolute immanence that is without what Schelling calls “personality”
(Freedom 33, 75). It is therefore characterized by a certain
utopianism and abstraction, whereas Hegel’s work suffers through time. Hegel’s
sympathetic nervous system also provides a model for the circulation of information in
complex systems; indeed as the symptom of what it describes, the Philosophy of Nature is a system that is at once digestive, nervous and
productive. This is to say that encyclopedics, the struggle of a single subject to
organize knowledge, is the labour of the negative, a difficult education
subject to accident and at times ruin. Sometimes, as in the
Phenomenology and the Introduction to the Encyclopedia, this struggle with the negative that is Bildung is cast as a spiritual autobiography. But sometimes, as in the Philosophy of Nature, it is the pathography of Spirit’s attempt “to
orient [itself] in the world of sickness” and to heal itself (Musselman 6), which is
possible only if we think of healing as an interminable analysis.

The author acknowledges the support of the Canada Research Chairs
Program in the preparation of this article.

Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopedia, or, An universal dictionary of
arts and sciences, containing a definition of the terms and accounts of the things
signify’d thereby, in the several arts, both liberal and mechanical, and the several
sciences, both human and divine; ... 1728.

---. "The Employment in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined
with Geometry, of Which Sample I Contains the Physical Monadology" (1756).
Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770. Trans. and ed. David
Walford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 47-66.

Wild, John. Foreword to Merleau-Ponty. The Structure of Behaviour. v-xvii.

Zammito, John. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of
Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Notes

[1] For instance the Intelligenzblatt Der Jenaischen
Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung (1804-41) provides notices of recent
publications under a number of disciplinary headings. In addition the 1818 issues of
this monthly journal, for example, include notices of lecture courses at the
University of Berlin, lists of books for sale and people who received doctorates. The
journal is a heterogeneous attempt to cover the sphere of knowledge. In Britain the
Edinburgh Philosophical Journal has a section on
“Scientific Intelligence” arranged under various areas.The short-lived German Museum (1800-1) reviews new publications in Germany, and
then has a Supplement broken down into different subject areas. BACK

[2] I capitalize Hegel’s
Encyclopedia only when referring to the work that consists of the Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind. The Encyclopedia project itself is much larger,
including lectures on aesthetics and on religion edited and published by Hegel’s
students. Hegel published very little: among his well-known texts, only the Phenomenology (1807), The Science of Logic
(1812, 1813, 1816), the Philosophy of Right (1821),
and the Heidelberg Encyclopedia (1817) and Berlin Encyclopedia (1827/30), which are outlines. Hegel’s many lecture
courses are subsystems that develop parts of the macrosystem that exists in outline,
and which he began to conceptualize well before 1817, in his earlier Jena system,
which he also did not publish. Even the Philosophy of Nature
as it comes down to us is an eclectic text, consisting of those parts of the outline
that pertain to nature, with Zusätze or expansions added by
K.L. Michelet from notes by Hegel’s students. We should not dismiss these eclectic
texts or Zusätze as not truly Hegel’s simply because he did
not publish them: this is to be bound by notions of final authorial intention that are
fundamentally not Romantic. Hegel did not publish his lectures because his living
system had to be endlessly annotated, expanded, qualified, and complicated: because he
was not the closed thinker posited by Derrida (Glas, "The Age of Hegel" ) and Hamacher. The format of the Zusatz is brilliantly addressed by Jean-Luc Nancy in The
Speculative Remark. We should note, and indeed insist, that the Zusatz or supplement is also intrinsic to the kind of “system”
represented by an encyclopedia. BACK

[3] Miller sometimes translates the
word Bildung as “culture” and sometimes as “education” (Phenomenology 8, 16; Phänomenologie 18,
28). In addition to its associations with Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, the German word is also connected with
Bild (picture or image), the word Hegel uses at the end of the
text to describe Spirit as having traversed a “gallery of images” in its education. It
is therefore unfortunate that at the end of the text, where Hegel couples Bild with Bildung, Miller does not translate
the word at all (Phenomenology 428; Phänomenologie 566).BACK

[4] Unlike Husserl, who continues the
German Idealist tradition of separating transcendental from empirical (or eidetic from
factual) sciences, Kant is not driven by a passion to eradicate the “natural
standpoint.” It simply does not fall within his domain, and when he deals with
empirical matters such as universal history or perpetual peace, his concern is how to
use the critical apparatus so as to think about these domains. BACK

[5] See Zammito (286-92) on the course entitled “Encyclopedia of
Philosophy as a Whole with an abridged History of Philosophy Based on Feder’s Sketch.”
Zammito speculates that there was more of this course than survives in printed form,
and mentions that the Encyclopedia lectures were bound (by a buyer) with those on
physical geography and physics (287). He thus argues for a closer connection of this
course to the work of the Popularphilosoph Johann Feder than
seems warranted by the Enzyklopädievorlesung published by
Gerhard Lehmann, and this in turn is because he follows a division between the
pre-Critical and Critical Kant, and sees the former, prior to the break with Herder,
as still allied with “anthropology.” But as noted by Louden (434), Kant was required
to use a textbook for his courses and generally paid little attention to his chosen
text. Feder probably played this role in the Encyclopedia course, while Kant’s own
contribution to the course is the Enzyklopädievorlesung
printed by Lehmann. In other words, while Kant may have been aware that one could
think of the “encyclopedia” in a broader (mixed empirical and transcendental) sense,
his own treatment of areas other than philosophy such as Anthropology and Physical
Geography was consistent with the architectonic mapped out in the first Critique, which rigorously separates the “rational” from the
“empirical” parts of disciplines. BACK

[6] But for further discussion of Schelling see
my articles “First Outline of a System of Theory” and “The Abyss of the Past.” BACK

[7] As always, Novalis provides little
elaboration, but pathological philosophy seems to be a philosophy open to failure: “An
absolute drive for perfection and completeness is morbid, as soon as it shows itself
to be destructive and adverse to what is imperfect, and
incomplete.” BACK

[8] Arkady Plotnitsky also takes up this complexity in terms
of Deleuze’s concept of the baroque: a “defining feature of the Baroque is the
multiplicity of varying and curved –convex and concave– mirrors .... Baroque houses
are full of mirrors and seem to need mirrors more than windows” (Plotnitsky 120). But
while also reading Hegel against the grain and emphasizing the complexity of the folds
within what he calls his “superfold” (121), Plotnitsky sees the totality of Hegel’s
work as a “divergent harmony” (132) in which the “upward movement of Spirit and
humanity,” albeit in “diagonal” form (127), is not jeopardized. BACK

[9] For a helpful discussion of this issue, see
Michael Friedman, Introduction to Kant’s
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, vii-x. BACK

[10] In Ideas for a Philosophy of
Nature (1797/1803) Schelling writes: “In Nature, therefore, the whole
absolute is knowable, although appearing Nature produces only successively, and in
(for us) endless development, what in true Nature exists all at once and in an eternal
fashion” (272). BACK

[11] We should bear in mind that for Hegel evolution, as the emergence of
one natural form from another, is not an actual series of events but a series of
“ideal” relationships (Nature 20-1) BACK

[12] In the Freedom essay Schelling writes: “Idealism, if it does not have as its basis
a living realism, becomes just as empty and abstract a system as that of Leibniz,
Spinoza, or any other dogmatist.... Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the
body; only both together can constitute a living whole” (26). In Ages
of the World he writes, “Whoever does not acknowledge the priority of
Realism wants evolution without the involution that preceded it. ... The greatest
glory of development is not expected from what easily unfolds. It is expected from
what has been excluded and which only decides to unfold with opposition (107). BACK

[13] Erinnerung or remembering, occasionally spelled as Er-Innerung or inwardizing, is a word used throughout the henomenology. The English translation of “knowledge” as having to
“travel a long way and work its passage” (15) loses the proto-Freudian force of the
original: “Um zum eigentlichen Wissen zu werden ... hat er durch einen langen Weg sich
hindurchzuarbeiten” (Phänomenologie 28). BACK

[14] In the Philosophy of Right, “members” are consistently opposed to
“self-sufficient individuals” or "parts" (64, 199-200, 264, 328; cf. also 315 which
specifically evokes the animal organism). Members are separate but in the end
subordinate to a whole. BACK

[15] The “body” of cognition
is the metaphor of Hegel’s translator A.V.Miller, but is in the spirit of Hegel, who
does begin his Preface by using anatomy to think about the nature of knowledge. Green
Musselman uses the term “pathography” to describe “autobiographical memoirs written by
modern-day physicians who suffer an illness” (6). BACK

[16] See my article “(In)Digestible
Material” (226-9). Hegel is not the only Romantic writer obsessed with his digestion,
Coleridge and de Quincey also being examples. BACK

[17] This schema is discussed in both the Phenomenology (160-70) and the Philosophy of
Nature, but the former does not include a discussion of disease. The
dialectic and the explicit relation of irritability to negativity come in only in the
discussion of disease in the latter. BACK